It (and many other similar models, now) is basically a mobile electronic device sold to the authorized public sector and fools mobile phone handsets into communicating with it. By fooling your phone from two different locations the position of the phone can be rapidly and reliably triangulated.
The device gets smaller all the time.
They’d ping1 from inside a van, then scoot lickety-split from a different location, ping2, do some quick math and they know where you are, even if your GPS services phone feature is off.
Additional pingScoots and they can get your location very, very, very accurately. You already saw a more primitive version of this process in the movie, “Zero Dark Thirty”.
You do not have to be talking on your phone, which can even be on “sleep” mode and still betray you. The Stingray is now small enough to fit in a suitcase, so they could now even figure out the target inside a crowded cafeteria, maybe.
The Stingray is a small, pirate mobile phone tower-in-a-box and is made by Harris Corp in Sarasota, Florida.
This happened with GPS trackers and last year they got slapped down. Certain agencies were slapping trackers on anything that moved without warrants.
The data that Stingray pulls should require an exceptionally specific and high level warrant. This is normally referred to as a T III for the portion of a federal code that wiretapping laws come from. Without that, agencies that use Stingray are asking to have whole cases thrown out of court, then the lawsuits come.